The Midday Talks lecture series is coordinated by Assistant Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee and is part of the Exploring Design Practice undergraduate course. These lectures are open to the public and registration is not required.

The Detroit-based architecture and design studio Akoaki, founded by Anya Sirota and Jean Louis Farges, is invested in amplifying architecture’s agency as a mechanism of social and urban transformation. Though historically aligned with a range of utopian and politically engaged practices, the methods Akoaki explores depart from both speculative representational conventions and the instrumentalized benevolence of architecture’s recent “social turn”. Alternately, the practice synthesizes aesthetics, social enterprise, and event planning in what can be described as a set of architectural interventions, pop actions, situational prototypes, and parties. Outwardly playful, each effort tests and critically re-evaluated architecture’s capacity to sponsor activity, to sustain cultural heritage, to advocate for disinvested neighborhoods, and, most fundamentally, to participate in public discourse. The talk will highlight the studio’s recent projects in Detroit, where working beyond traditional models of patronage, Akoaki experimentally re-situates architecture in the realm of planning and equitable urban re-development.

Anya Sirota is an interdisciplinary designer and educator. As principal of the Detroit-based studio Akoaki, Sirota works at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and art. Her projects exploring socio-spatial strategies for urban activation have received recognition in international exhibitions and publications. Prior to earning a master of architecture degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Sirota worked as a documentary filmmaker in New York City. She is currently on faculty at the University of Michigan where she teaches design studios and directs the Taubman College ArcPrep program.